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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising to me that they use actual boot drives and don't just boot their machines off of USB sticks or via PXE or like those fancy Dell dual redundant internal sdcard modules.

But perhaps the boot drives are just leftovers that are too small to be used any more for storage?

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Yev here -> The boot drives are helpful for log storage/collection so the extra capacity is nice - plus they're not "large" drives so the costs associated are pretty minimal!

Is the output of what you'd normally write to these boot drives significant enough to impact the network? I'm surprised you can't just stream it elsewhere to consolidate the cost.

Interesting question! I don't know but I'll ask the dev team.

*Edit -> asked around here's whats up -> we do currently stream some logs/data off the device but we also like it to be written to disk - there's something about having multiple copies that we like ;-)

> there's something about having multiple copies that we like ;-)

With an attitude like that, you should consider running a backup as a service company! ;-)

I guess that's fair. If anything happens to the network, you don't want to lose your logs in the mean time. :)

local logs also make troubleshooting much easier, especially if you have to bring a system up offline for forensic analysis.

That's fair; I can totally understand wanting to have an on-machine bodybag for certain kinds of failures. I know there are a lot of differences, but speaking from the point of view of having spent ten years working with fleets of mobile robots, there's no way that exclusively off-board logging would be sufficient for what I do.

Might just be convenient for logs and other random junk

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